


Full Circle

by oceansinmychest



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9793727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: Joan handing back the neatly folded cloth meant the end of something. Of what, Vera wasn't certain. [ Alternate outlook to s4x ep12. ]





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this up rather quickly since I'll be away for the weekend, but this has been on my mind for awhile. We see Vera lend Joan her handkerchief when Ferguson is first admitted to Wentworth. Then, in the season finale, we see Joan hand it back to her. I just wanted to get in Vera's headspace and branch out an alternate ending.

Joan handing back the neatly folded cloth meant the end of something. Of what, Vera wasn't certain.

Vera took the handkerchief – her handkerchief – back from the taller woman, Joan fucking Ferguson who looked so well put together in that moment.

Two fingers, not the burned ones for those still carried the risk of infection, traced the rigid edges of Vera's badge. She polished it nightly, proud of the gleam and how far she had come at Wentworth. Now, she felt undermined by her former mentor who wore the sliest of looks. Joan looked Vera up and down, as though to say, ' you look good enough to eat. '

All pleasantries, the lines around Ferguson's eyes crack along with the parenthesis that frame her coy, pink lips.

“I'll let you keep the badge as a memento.”

Her sleek ponytail, threaded with iron, swam from side to side like a goldfish, but Joan was far from that – more of a shark in open waters.

Vera's trembling fingers clutched the cloth harder, her knuckles bleached white.

“Thank you,” Joan said.

Governor Bennett wanted to laugh at the ludicrous situation. Joan Ferguson **thanked** her. _Her_ , of all people.

And now she walked away scot-free. Cleared of her charges with a purposeful sway of her hips.

Vera glared silent daggers into the woman's back, the distance between them becoming a large, gaping wound. Jack couldn't bandage the cut, but he was new and exciting. A temporary taboo. A slight anesthetic to numb Bennett.

She thumbed the handkerchief, as absent-minded as can be. It brought her back to a muted memory from childhood. How her faceless father (she couldn't remember his sad features; not now) handed his cloth to her after some of the schoolgirls mocked her for her appearance, her personality, her meek demeanor. Even spit on her.

It had all come full circle.

She put her lips to the soft, cotton fabric, remembering how Joan's fingers seemed to linger despite the arrogance that affected her smokey voice. She kissed it in the privacy of her office with the blinders drawn shut. She closed her eyes and sighed the sigh of someone so foolishly entranced and hopelessly jaded. Deep down, it cut her heart, pulled it open and bred an infection that Joan left in her savage wake.

Vera's radio went off, all static and an errant click. Will Jackson was on the other end, his voice hoarse, his breathing erratic.

“It's Bea Smith,” he said, as if that were an answer.

Vera rushed outside, past the metal door that felt so damn heavy and clanged from the force. Her wide blue eyes ventured to Joan first. Joan, covered in blood. The sickness within her spoke to her conscience: was Joan hurt?

She wanted to reach out to the woman until her horrified expression traced over a kneeling Will cradling Bea Smith's limp body.

It was Bea's blood that Joan wore.

Joan, who seemed so high and mighty, now appeared stunned.

A first.

Dressed in red like Mephistopheles, Joan _was_ the Devil that all of Wentworth loved to hate. In that moment, Vera pitied her. It made her better than the Faustian scheme they fell into. It made her a better person and now the strict mechanical guard she had **become**.

Daylight burned Vera's eyes. She strained to make out Ferguson who held her hands up in a broken prayer to a God that had forsaken them both. Her palms cracked, the blood drying. Joan wanted nothing more than to scrub it off, to scrub it all away until her skin was raw and pink. She trembled. She trembled and Vera saw despite the bright, blue sky that threatened to engulf this tragedy.

She felt equally paralyzed, a mouse in the hole.

It was all too _funny_. She let out a nervous, frantic laugh before more guards rushed outside to detain Ferguson.

Vera still clung to the handkerchief, clung to the past when things were easier and she stood by Joan's side, but she couldn't go back now.

Not when they'd come full circle.

 

 

 

 


End file.
